Richard Taruskin, a scholar of great learning and erudition who, as one of his editors once memorably put it, "only starts warming up around the 3,000-word mark," has uncorked a 12,000-word review/lambasting of three books purporting to argue the cause for classical music in the New Republic. With wicked fun, he destroys the arguments of Julian Johnson, Joshua Fineberg and Lawrence Kramer. He also inadvertently raises the profiles of these books to heights, and generated amounts of conversation about them, that they would never have achieved had America's most public musicologist not written about them at length in a national news magazine.
Taruskin's lusty bravado and the rude, put-down-laden qualities of some of his writing has always rubbed me the wrong way, since it's more appropriate for a tabloid-writer or some paper you could pick up for free in a sidewalk kiosk. (It's entertaining, but so is a cockfight.) The gloating, the I've-forgotten-more-than-you'll-ever-know arrogance, the snide assertions, none of it is the finest way to discuss either the music, its practitioners or the words written about it. I've argued in the past that classical music shouldn't be treated with kid gloves, or as if it's not part of contemporary culture, but Taruskin's intellectual thuggishness ultimately detracts from his arguments.
But the larger point here, it seems to me, is that we've now progressed from The Crisis of Classical Music, to The Saving of Classical Music, to Criticism of The Saving of Classical Music. No other genre of music takes its future livelihood so seriously, its obsolescence at some as-yet-undetermined date as a fact, or feels the need to raise an army to defend itself, as does classical music. It doesn't matter to those arguing these positions that 2,400 people showed up to hear the Chicago Symphony play Mozart and a Mark-Anthony Turnage premiere last night. It doesn't matter that Angela Gheorghiu can get on the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times by being fired by the Lyric Opera, or that one small contemporary music ensemble (the International Contemporary Ensemble) can find upwards of 200 people to fill each of eleven venues in seven days, or that another (eighth blackbird) can entice 800 to an enormous amphitheater. (Yes, there were large of amounts of freebies given away. That's not unheard of in popular environs, however.)
My problem with Taruskin, who, yes, has forgotten more than I'll ever know, at least about the gamba, is the weakness of those he bullies. He's like the schoolyard tough with a penchant for the obvious who finds the skinny kid on the playground, then says, "You know what your problem is? You're too skinny!" before beating him senseless.
Fineberg's book "is sooner meant to comfort the author's own cohort," Taruskin writes at one point, and he's right. Fineberg is a Boston University prof and composer who's taught at Harvard and Columbia, and I've heard some of his music. But I remember more his grandiose spoken introduction, starting with "I don't like melody," and then explaining how he integrated Japanese sounds into his Western tonal palette. Dude, Boulez did it 30 years ago, in his Rituel for Bruno Maderna. My point is that a book by Fineberg is only going to be read by other specialists, his friends who might give two cents about the future of classical music. Yet Taruskin devotes so many words to the guy that you'd think he's Alex Ross, or John Adams, a writer or composer with a broad following whose prescriptions and opinions might carry weight outside of Cambridge.
Given his word-length, it would've been impossible for Taruskin not to touch on What Must Be Done, and he argues in favor, or at least tacit approval, of "accommodation," to the vagaries of the marketplace. This is, he rightly states, "a normal part of the evolutionary history of any art." Today, that accommodation takes the form of, say, Jennifer Higdon getting a commission ahead of Marco Stroppa, the Italian modernist. But, and this is the important part that gets left out of these discussions every single time, the pie takes in concert life on four continents, and is big enough for both to take a bite out of it. The accommodation he's talking about isn't a black/white, either/or scenario, given the number of performers and institutions out there. The best will win out in every style. Yet Taruskin devotes his mental energy not to this phenomena, but decrying the efforts of three writers with extraordinarily small readerships.
The best will win out in classical music, too, just as it does in popular music. I keep wishing that we could just drop The Death of Classical Music, a hyperbolic idea which appears to be deathless itself. We've now moved on to the third iteration of this argument, the criticism of those who wish to save it. Can't we just play the music, let the marketers attract them any way they can, let the critics write about their enthusiasms, and move on? The defense of classical music will persuade no one, because you can't argue in favor of art. People either respond to it, or they don't, they don't accept rational arguments for why they ought to like something. (Believe me, I know this from experience.)
The only way to persuade people to listen to classical music is to have them listen to classical music. It sounds tautological, but the music is the best argument for itself. No book about why people should care can fully communicate that, just as a book about visual art will fail without illustrations. Taruskin's vast reading leads him to think that others are as willing to read up on the music as he is. (He does agree with the point that writing about music only paraphrases the experience of listening to it, though.) Classical music doesn't need saving from its devotees, it just needs curious people, like Taruskin was once, who will take a chance on something they haven't heard before, and who then discover something they cannot live without.
